With its sometimes diffuse structuring and recurrent strain of fantasy, Beethoven's C minor Piano Concerto—Arrau's recent recording of it completes his Philips cycle—is tricky to bring off, though in a good performance a larger coherence will generally emerge, not least because of Beethoven's long-term exploitation of a pun on the schizoid G sharp/A flat. Initially, the Largo's E major tonality seems merely bleakly to confront the prevailing C minor and E flat major; but all is revealed at the point of transition into the finale when the violins' G sharp in the Largo's final chord is swiftly contradicted and re-affirmed by the piano at the start of the Rondo. After that it's a case of 'watch this space'.
I mention this seemingly abstruse detail because the moment implies the kind of segue that Beethoven will make mandatory in the lead to the finales of his last two piano concertos. Perahia, Haitink, and their CBS editors give us precisely this. So despite a rather too hefty band on the disc itself, did Glenn Gould with Leonard Bernstein and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in a performance (CBS 72796, 2/73—nla) that, like the Perahia, shows at every point real understanding of what is going on in this remarkable work.
You will imagine my horror, then, when on opening the new CD set of the five concertos from Arrau I found that Philips had split the C minor Concerto across two discs, with the break coming, believe it or not, between the Concerto's slow movement and finale. The problem does not recur on cassette, I am happy to say. But Arrau's generally measured tempos have posed timing problems, pushing the LP set (where the C minor is broken after the first movement) up to four discs as well as causing this dreadful mess on the CDs. Getting the Arrau performances on to three CDs would have involved one 76-minute disc and one 72-minute disc; tricky, perhaps, but not, I would have thought, beyond the technical capacity of a company that pioneered the medium in the first place.
This is Arrau's fourth recording of the C minor Concerto and it is far removed in style from the rather more extrovert and brilliant 1947 recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy, the accompaniment bright but sometimes slovenly in rhythm (Columbia 33CX1080, 12/53—nla). The new performance is far better accompanied and is touched with a host of fresh insights conveyed in phrasing and tone-colouring of a rare and settled beauty, though perhaps divested a little of that wonderful sense of inevitability—Beethoven in his heaven and all's right with the world—that we had from Arrau's two middle-period recordings with Galliera and the Philharmonia (Columbia 33CX1616, 2/59—nla) and Haitink and the Concertgebouw (Philips SAL3735, 8/65—nla). I thought the new account of the finale rather dull; but, then, l was in such a fury after switching the CDs that I probably ceased to be a competent judge.
Kempff on DG now strikes me as being rather too quirky in this C minor Concerto; and his cadenzas, his own in the first four concertos, will infuriate some as much as they will delight those of us—people who like steam trains and still refer to the wireless—who occasionally tire of all the regimentation and ratiocination of modern music-making. Pollini, also on DG, is brilliant, ratioci-native to a fault, but the C minor Concerto doesn't take well to so relentless a performance. Pollini's 1976 recording of the G major Concerto with Bohm is masterly, one of the finest in the catalogue and he and Abbado make something especially dazzling of the Choral Fanatasia which is enterprisingly added to his set. But Pollini is ill-matched with Jochum in a live performance of the C major Concerto—Jochum dragging, Pollini driving on with exasperated forcefulness—and in the Emperor Concerto, which I have heard Pollini do in concert with sovereign splendour, there remains a faint whiff of the spirit of Tamburlaine or Coriolanus about some of the playing, the tension and the adamantine tone again producing a certain feeling of relentlessness.
Perahia's account of the C minor Concerto is a joy from start to finish, wonderfully conceived, executed conducted and recorded as SP and RL have both made clear on earlier occasions in these columns. Coupled with this account of the G major Concerto, the record began life by winning the 1986 Gramophone Concerto Award. In these two concertos, and in the two earlier ones, Perahia and Haitink are difficult to fault. The First Concerto is especially well done with a quick first movement and the apt and delightful inclusion in the finale of a cadenza, recently unearthed, that Beethoven sketched in 1800.
If Perahia is anywhere slightly below par, it is in the Emperor Concerto. As SP suggested, the reading gives us an emergent view of the work, undiscursive but perhaps at times lacking in a certain largeness of vision and purpose. For that we must return to Kempff or Arrau, which only confirms, I suppose, the pitfalls of buying cycles rather than separate performances. I would still, however regard the Perahia cycle on CBS as being far and away the most consistently accomplished of those currently available, more or less everything, in SP's words, ''understood, savoured, communicated''. The recordings are a joy to listen to and Haitink's accompaniments match Davis's for Arrau and Leitner's for DG, whilst being superior to Jochum's for Pollini or Levine's for Brendel on that generally very uneven live Chicago cycle on Philips.
Arrau, at best, gives us music-making of rare depth and breeding, but the performances are perhaps best taken singly, the Emperor first, followed by the readings of the G major and C major Concertos. Kempff's account of the Emperor provides an ideal foil to the Perahia and is available, again coupled rather oddly with the Op. 111 Piano Sonata, on a single mid-price CD (DG 419 468-2GGA, 12/87). It remains a classic recording that sounds very well in DG's remastering of the 1962 originals which often bring out previously unnoticed orchestral details with remarkable immediacy. This applies to Kempff's set as a whole, which, at mid price on CD, is still a very tempting proposition, quirky cadenzas and all. In many ways these are the liveliest performances, physically and intellectually, since Schnabel's pre-war set (Arabesque/Harmonia Mundi Z6549/51, 5/86) with a matchless, if paradoxical, blend of rigour, energy, delight, and inspired whimsy. Not all the premises will be clear to all collectors, and for this reason I regret DG's decision to include no notes on either Beethoven or Kempff with the set. When in 1979 they put out three bargain-priced LPs of Kempff's in some ways even more remarkable 1953 set with Van Kempen (DG 2701 014, 6/79—nla) they added a masterly 1,800 word essay on Kempff's Beethoven by Edward Greenfield that drew liberally and interestingly on Kempff's own writings. All that and the LPs for just £6 25. A revised reprint would not have come amiss. I should add that the specially priced CBS set with Perahia is handsomely documented.'